Personal Feedback about VSTSynthFont

[Telaestheticist]

Recently in my music journey, after a lot of experimentation, I fell in love with Dungeon Synth genre - itself often considered a subgenre of Dark Ambient, which I have also frequently enjoyed as a listener. It suits my orchestral music temperament, and is aesthetically satisfying on many levels. What sticks out most about the genre, outside of the aforementioned thematic elements, is its strong reliance on Soundfonts - though FM synth is also sometimes used, most often in combination with soundfonts.

I also recently got my first audio interface, a Behringer U-Phoria UM2, so despite it's modest offering, I now have more than enough headroom to actually make electronica like I should be (without errors, for the first time ever). But unfortunately, my use of Sforzando quickly came to an end because of a flaw in the plugin that I couldn't resolve. The built in effects (mostly reverb) would go back to the default setting, on every single track, whenever I would load up a project. Since I got no response from their forums after a couple of days, I continued looking for an alternative until I found VSTSynthFont.

Once I switched over from Sforzando to VSTSynthFont, using Zynewave Podium as my DAW, I switched over to its native zReverb plugin - readjusting my EQ to be sharper as well, on all of my tracks. Ultimately, this all was a blessing in disguise because it forced me to better understand reverb, and much like Podium, I can now say that I found another independent music software developer with something worthy of my support. I appreciate the simplicity of VSTSynthFont, and the output gain works perfectly for me at the maximum setting in my arrangements.

I will say that save for the normal rough edges of audio production in general, the only negative I've found with your plugin is the reverb setting. Out of interest I decided to give it a try, but all it really seems to do is produce distortion of the soundfont output. It's ultimately a very minor negative because the native reverb of my DAW is far more effective and my experience with Sforzando makes me more likely to depend on plugins dedicated to certain functions instead of relying to heavily on ancillary features.

I thought that I would share my experience with your plugin here in the forum and express my gratitude for providing me a well-needed alternative to the other less-optimal options I was considering. I'll be glad to support SynthFont with a paid license at the end of my trial. Thank you.

[Admin]

Welcome to the group!
And thanks for the feedback.
I take it seriously and will investigate. I just now run one of my standard tests - a project in Cubase with VSTSynthFont used in several tracks - and I couldn't hear anything strange with reverb enabled. I tested all of the five presets. Maybe you can give me some more? Maybe an audio file or two. For example, playback with and w/o reverb. I suggest you send these to me directly at kenneth AT synthfont DOT com. Take your time, I will be out of office for the rest of the week.

[Telaestheticist]

I tested the reverb settings in the options panel for several soundfonts. There isn't a crackling sound anymore but it's pretty clear, at least to me, that it doesn't effect the sound at all, even when I disable the native reverb plugin I'm using in Podium. In otherwords, it doesn't confer reverberation. It does seem like the crackling was probably clipping, since at the time I had output gain turned up. There is however another issue I've noticed, which has caused me to rely on native gain settings on my DAW instead, and perhaps gain plugins if I need to in the future. If I use the output gain within the VSTSynthFont options panel, everything works fine, until I save it and come back into the project. If I play back the current project, it is as if the output gain was not enabled. I only get output gain back when I open up the options panel - almost as if it kickstarts the setting back into place. The standard volume options on the main panel works just fine, so I've kept everything at 2.01 on every soundfont on my projects. I don't need the output gain for my projects but it would provide more headroom if it worked properly.

[Admin]

Thanks, I'll get back to you with more in-depth thoughts next week.